If you're not making an anti-Christian rant, you don't blame the Christians for destroying the Library of Alexandria when in fact it was already long gone.

I have yet to see the film, but the screenplay seems to be by George Pell.

As a friend who studied classics said, it tried hard to be "painfully historically accurate" (apart from the suffocation by Davos to avoid Hypatia being flayed alive which could not be put on the screen but was hinted at by the other murderers) to the detriment of plot, but if you are going to make a film many Christians wrongly see as anti-Christian, you cannot compromise the historical truth, or your points are to easily dismissed.

The film makes a point of contrasting the fundamentalist bishop with three Christians close to Hypatia, her students, the fictional Davos (needed for the softened ending) who joins the murderous moral police, the politician who converted for convenience, and the moderate bishop. The basic nature of people is rarely altered by a religion, and it can give them an excuse or reason to indulge their worse or better natures.

It is one of the more impressive films I've seen in a long time, a proper tragedy, good history, a good exposition not only what classical philosophers thought but how they reasoned, and a thoughtful reflection on our times, where any one religious belief can have a barbaric wing. It is a shame it did not have a wider release, but I expect it will do very well on DVD.

As well as the story, some of the cinematography is wonderful - the camera during the library's destruction moving under thrown scrolls, and staying upside down for some time - a visual representation of what was happening to civilization.

the film showed that men and religion are a lethal combination and always to the detriment of women

Probably the only way to see this movie is to buy it from Amazon. No doubt religious cult extremists have pressured the main stream cinemas not to show it. We all expected as such when we saw all the trailers on the ABC movie show and newspapers, the one thing the religious don't like is the truth in the public domain. The day of it's advertised release it just disappeared off the planet. It reminds us of the 7 year Ban, Monty Pythons "Life of Brian" received form the corrupt Bjelke Petersen Govt in Qld. Whether the religious cults will have it's video release sales and rentals receive the same pressure as the cinemas we will have to wait and see. This is a good example of the power of the religious cults in our modern democracy. They can ban advertising on buses, our historic doco movies, ethics classes in our schools etc etc!Almost a theocracy, defiantly not a democracy?
My copy is in the mail from the USA at the moment, at least the religious cults haven't interfered and stopped the mail yet, but I bet their working on it?

As of December 17th:

Melbourne;
http://bit.ly/iiHRwS
Sydney;
http://bit.ly/f5SZSP
Perth;
http://bit.ly/fz0NKE
Adelaide;
----
Brisbane;
http://bit.ly/dKlvkl

Select your city on the left, and enter "Agora" in the field above.

Make no mistake. The movie Agora goes a long way towards being an anti-Christian rant, even if portrayed with some sophistication.  Could the director, Amenábar, have made it more so if he tried?

In the history of film, the two biggest of box office hits which went out of their way to portray Christianity in a positive light were Ben Hur and Chariots of Fire.

Countering these was the Jodie Foster science fiction film, Contact, based on the novel by renouned atheist, Carl Sagan, which portays Christians quite hysterically. Perhaps not coincidently, Sagan enjoyed sharing this (false) version of the story of Hypatia on his TV series, Cosmos, 

Another very persuasive film was the 1960 anti-creationist polemic, Inherit the Wind. Covering the legendary Scopes Monkey trial of 1923, this court room drama has helped turn public attitudes against Christianity, portraying Christians as Bible thumping hypocrites. 

In recent times evolutionists have taken a bit of a hit with the Ben Stein documentary, Expelled, which detailed how the rights of scientists who have dared challenge the evolutionary paradigm were being systematically suppressed in academic circles.

Inherit the Wind, however, never claimed to portray history accurately. It was a parable of history. It openly changed the names of the persons involved. Scopes name was changed to Cates. The prosecution lawyer's name changed from Bryan to Brady. Scopes' defense lawyer, Darrow's name, was changed to Drummond. Several events and happenings were clearly changed also.

But the problem with the movie, Agora, is that it is claiming to be an historical drama, with basis in history.            

Below are some of it's historical misgivings. 

'The library of Alexandria was burnt to the ground, not by Christian mobs in the fifth century, but by Julius Caesar's troops, some forty years before Jesus was born.'  

'Hypatia was best known as a neo-Platonist philosopher, a devotee of Plato and Plotinus. Not only were there Christians in Hypatia's classes, not only were Christian bishops among her circle of friends, but Christian theologians – Augustine, Ambrose, and Origen, just to name the most prominent – were enthusiastic advocates of neo-Platonism. Therefore, to portray her as the noble champion of reason over and against mouth-breathing Christian primitives is just ridiculous.'

'Hypatia, sadly enough, found herself caught in the middle of a struggle between two powerful figures in Alexandria, namely, Orestes the civil authority and Cyril the bishop. She was most likely killed in retaliation for the murder of some of Cyril's supporters by agents of Orestes.'

Selections taken from Father Robert Barron,
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0251.htm

Barron goes on to explain his perceived anti-Christian motives in Agora's portrayal.

'In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz. The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated.'

The position that Julius Caesar burnt the library and therefore Cyril's mob could not have is pretty silly.

The destruction in the late Republic was of one wing of the library. The serapeum in the film was another wing, and there were also all the extra books written and coped during imperial times. The final destruction came with islamic expansion.

As to neoPlatonism - well, it is at least a logically consistent, if brittle, cosmogeny, based on "all is one", follows from pythagorean mysticism as much as plato's theory of forms, and, I might add, assimilated almost in total by early xtian fathers in an attempt to give xtianity some intellectual basis. Indeed, the film alludes to this kind of thing when the moderate bishop (with the xtian-for-convenience politician) says to hypatia "you are as xtian as we are".

The distance between neoplatonist and xtian is about the same as between today's moderate xtian and a quaker, and less than the difference between gnostic xtianity and today's fundy xtian.

To round out Hypatia not only as an even more admirable polymath to an audience, her murder more obnoxious, explain the quasi-euclidean cosmogeny of neoplatonism to a modern audience would have taken another hour.

There is one nagging annoyance, however: in the film, hypatia walks knowingly to he doom, in reality she was dragged from her chariot on her way home. That the roman military uniforms were a couple of centuries out is a minor quibble only.

Xtians objecting to the film on the basis of historical inaccuracies can be shown to lack a knowledge not only of secular history, but the many source documents (contemporary through to a C10 byzantine encyclopaedia) that are very much pro-Hypatia, as well as a knowledge of the different theological schools of early xtianity.

As in the film, today's monotheisms are not monolithic - for every Rowan Williams there is a George Pell, a firebrand anti-evolution southern baptist. There are the moderate sufis, and taliban. Those antagonistic to the film are probably not only blind to history, but have an unrealistic view of the present.

Balneus,
Why did you speak of the 'fundamentalist bishop' in the movie. The word fundamentalist is a bit out of place in the early centuries, isn't it? The useage of this word is quite modern. Or does it fall into the category of sayings such as: Augustine was a Calvinist (because he believed in God's sovereign election)?   

Can I ask, why do you keep using the word xtian instead of Christian, even when quoting dialogue from the movie?